What about gas prices as a percentage of our income? In other words, does the gas bite of our paycheck rival the bite of yesteryear? Not even close. Given today's fatter paycheck, we pay less as a percentage of our mean disposable income. A gallon was 27 cents in 1949 -- but to put the same pinch on your wallet today, you'd pay $6.68. Gas for 1962's "muscle cars" cost 31 cents a gallon. To feel the same economic impact today, you'd pony up $4.48 a gallon.
If Hazlitt were followed, interventionist politicians and their intellectual bodyguards in the academic world would be unemployed. If it's not bad enough that he defied the economics establishment, his airtight case for the free market is accessible to the layman, and that's anathema to the economics establishment. Thumb through any issue of a top economics journal and you'll know why Hazlitt's book is considered heretical. Not because it doesn't make sense, but because it does; not because it isn't logical, but because it is; not because it isn't true to life, but because it is. Translate their jargon into English, and we find most economists beginning with such axioms as "let's assume everybody knows everything" or "nobody knows anything" or "people never change their minds" or "all goods are identical." Men and women are stripped of their individuality to make them fit into mechanistic models, and the economy is seen as static, or at best a series of shifting static states, without elaboration or the process of change. Deductions from such axioms must, of course, be false.
Hazlitt, like Mises, starts with the assumption that individuals act, that they do so with a purpose, and that as conditions change, their plans change. He makes no separation between "microeconomic" and "macroeconomic," terms commonly used to give the impression that different principles and laws apply to the whole economy than apply to individuals. So that while it may be justified to talk about purposive action, decisions on the margin, and subjective valuations at the individual level, this is of no relevance for the macro-managers in government.
But Hazlitt is a methodological individualist, and thus recognizes that the economy must be analyzed from the standpoint of individual action. Most economists are notorious justifiers of special-interest legislation because they ignore what Hazlitt so eloquently charts in Economics in One Lesson: the unseen and long-run effects of government policy. To Hazlitt, as an Austrian school economist, "economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."
"...there is no rational basis upon which the government can properly prevent an individual from choosing to end his own life. Our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that we need no one's permission to live, and that no one may forcibly obstruct our efforts to achieve personal happiness. But if happiness becomes impossible to attain, due to a dread disease or some other calamity, a person must be able to exercise the right to end his own life."
"To hold otherwise--to declare that society must give us permission to commit suicide--is to contradict the right to life at its root," said Bowden. "If we have a duty to go on living, despite our better judgment, then our lives do not belong to us, and we exist by permission, not by right.
"For these reasons, each individual has the right to decide the hour of his death and to implement that solemn decision as best he can. The choice is his because the life is his. And if a doctor is willing--not forced--to assist in the suicide, based on an objective assessment of his patient's mental and physical state, the law should not stand in his way."
Copyright © 2007 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.
Mencken's Creed
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty...
I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech...
I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.
I believe in the reality of progress.
I - But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
...the overall trend in the U.S. refinery business in the past 30 years has been to expand existing refineries, as opposed to building new ones. For many reasons, it is just too hard to build a new plant in this country, so the refiners have been overhauling and expanding the existing production base. There are fewer environmental hurdles, the local communities tend to be more in favor of expansion, and the refiners are dealing with fewer political unknowns. So the net effect is that in the past decade, refinery upgrades and expansions in the U.S. have added the equivalent of 10 ‘new’ refineries to the total base, and there is something like the equivalent of eight more refineries being ‘built’ via upgrades to existing facilities. This is why U.S. refinery output is at a record high.”
...
“The price of gas is rising,” said the Peak Oil correspondent, “because there are more people buying it than there are selling it. And there will be, for the rest of your life.”
One thing history has taught us is that when you’re dealing with totally irrational people, the middle-road approach doesn’t work. Yet, this is precisely the approach that flip-flop, mushy politicians continue to pursue in the Middle East. In fact, it’s pretty much their approach to all the major problems of our day.
Again, Ron Paul’s stance on 9/11 is not the issue here. My respect for him is based on the consistency of his beliefs. He is not coming at the Iraq War or the 9/11 attacks from a 21st century liberal’s point of view. The latter views are not mushy, they’re just plain stupid.
By contrast, Congressman Paul’s viewpoints on all major issues are based on his libertarian belief that government powers should be confined to those specifically set forth in the Constitution. It is for this reason that he believes the government has no right to use your tax dollars to roam the earth and stick its nose in other people’s business.
He believes this to be so whether it involves invading other countries with bombs or invading them with humanitarian aid. I think we can all agree that humanitarian aid is a wonderful thing, but it should be left to the humanitarians! In case anyone has bothered to notice, the Founding Fathers never put anything about humanitarian aid (or thousands of other activities that today’s politicians engage in) in the Constitution.
Politicos like Mush Romney, Mush McCain, and Mush Giuliani can always be counted on to tell the mush, the whole mush, and nothing but the mush. In fact, the whole event was mush to do about nothing. The more things change, the more they stay the same. But if you’re a mush lover, the “debate” must have been a real treat.
What brings out the mush in most candidates, of course, is their insatiable thirst for power. It is a thirst that completely overwhelms the petty notion of principle.
If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
It was only after it became perfectly obvious to every living person that the market was serving the poor that the socialist Left abandoned its goal of material prosperity of the working poor. Now they tell us that material prosperity itself is the problem (and actually Rothbard took note of this ideological turn in the late 1950s). If we want true justice, the new view went, we must all learn to live without. What should concern us is the destruction of the environment, the exploitation of cultural minorities, the hidden costs of industrialization, and even such bogeymen as warm weather.
What the Spider-Man movies show us is a simpler time when the socialists made a strong but empirically testable claim: socialism would serve proletarian interests whereas capitalism is always contrary to proletarian interests. That claim turned out to be 100% false. The movie makes one nostalgic for such simple-minded and easily refutable views. Perhaps it is appropriate that such a vision live on only in comic books and the movies based on them.
There was no end to the problems, and there was never any certainty in the outcome. Some of the problems in the course of time would be solved, some persist to this day and will never be fully resolved. But what strikes one most forcefully in surveying the struggles and achievements of that distant generation is less what they failed to do than what they did do, and the problems that they did in fact solve. One comes away from encounters with that generation, not with a sense of their failings and hypocrisies -- they were imperfect people, bound by the limitations of their own world -- but with a sense of how alive with creative imaginings they were; how bold they were in transcending the world they had been born into -- a world in which the brutality of unlimited state power was normal -- and in conceiving of a state system in which power was limited, defined, and defensive, and whose force would liberate people, not confine them.
How did that happen? What accounts for their creative imagination? What conditions made it possible? Can such conditions and such achievements recur?
Sadly, when idealistic lads and lasses bid farewell to their clueless profs at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale, they have learned very little about the lessons of history. Worse, the pudding heads who were in charge of teaching them likely perverted the lessons of history to ensure that these future leaders of our society will make the same mistakes as their predecessors.
The great Thomas Sowell explained it even better than Santayana when he said, "Everything is new if you are ignorant of history. That is why ideas that have failed repeatedly in centuries past reappear again, under the banner of 'change,' to dazzle people and sweep them off their feet."
